The Future of Innovation

I see there being two key trends in motion which will significantly affect the Future of Innovation.

For many years I have watched a quiet battle fought to encourage academic researchers away from an old-fashioned research-for-research’s-own-sake mindset. I have always canvassed that there should be consideration of the broader economic benefits of ongoing and potential future academic research projects, issues that necessarily lay outside the protected environment of the university’s walls.

Academics and university managers have occasionally appeared to be oblivious to the nature and sheer speed of commercial technology developments and therefore failed to create as much new knowledge as perhaps could have been expected, inadvertently compromising the evolution of new products and services.

Ultimately the responsibility for such subtle shift of mindset to embrace the requirements of the external whilst making a balance with the internal, must rest with the university’s own technology transfer officers, and this is where I see an important changes occurring, the first of my trends for The Future of Innovation.

The second I see relates to geography, recognising that we are now part of a global economy.

It is clear that the creation of many of the most innovative products of the last half century was in some part due to the close proximity (both by geography and of goal) of high quality research-based universities with high technology businesses (just think of the clusters of innovation that surround Harvard, Princeton, Berkley & MIT in the United States, or the many science parks around Oxford & Cambridge in United Kingdom). The link is clear and should continue to be encouraged and driven by relationships developed between high tech industry and local academic technology transfer offices.

Such geographical relationships must not, though, be allowed to become a hindrance to the exploitation of broader sources of IP. In this internet age, whilst mutuality of goal must remain, the boundaries of geography must be allowed to stretch, whereby industry can seek far and wide to source the most appropriate IP to drive the Innovation of the Future.

Nowadays universities located in countries where their role is seen as a key component of national research & innovation policy, work with well funded technology transfer offices in environments conducive to strong academic/commercial ties. These ties are driven by clear and transparent policies of global knowledge transfer, research collaborations and mutually beneficial licensing agreements.

Those universities in countries where government are now developing policies as outlined above, including the “sleeping giants” of Brazil, India & China, will start to discover the benefits of increased links between their research groups with their extensive untapped IP portfolios, and the IP-hungry commercial organisations elsewhere seeking to explore and ultimately commercialise that IP.

Of course, this dynamic must not be one-way, where the IP from the academic groups in the developing countries simply flows to the developed world’s industry. It must be two-way with IP flowing back to help drive new projects and the development in turn of more innovative technologies in those developing areas.

Article © 2009 Mr Mark McBride. All rights reserved.